Monthly Archives: September 2016

This is my view each and every day at school – – the corner view in my little green painted concrete box. It ain’t a deluxe office in the sky but it is my little work home. On the right side you will see pictures of my three favorite girls (two white poodles Snowball and Kelsey and one black poodle Mimi). Kelsey has passed away but I keep the picture up of the three of them. Every rough day is always made better by looking at their faces. On the left I kept just a very few cards given to me by students. Each of them represent a unique set of memories and a unique challenge in teaching. They keep me inspired. Read more →

Company is all about experiments. Some work – some are there to improve for next year. One experiment that I revived from my grad school days – – is a day of playing with toys. That’s right. Everyone brought a toy – or in some cases a bundle of toys – and set up their small play space in the Blackbox. The mission was to simply play – as they had done years ago – hopefully as they did before the technology bug took over every breathing moment. Read more →

In the midst of a normal day – in the crazy that becomes one class morphing into another – in the shuffle of papers in and the papers out – in the midst of the excuse notes to come – to go – and to do either and both earlier and later it happened. I saw that he had been standing in the back of rhe room unusually patient, waiting and quiet that he caught my eye. Read more →

In Directing Class everyone was asked to write a “Confession.” It was to be fit the following format:
1. One page in length
2. Involve only 2 characters
3. Have NO stage directions
4. Give the vast majority of the words to one character and have the second character speak only at the end – only for a sentence or two – and bring the entire scene to a conclusion. Read more →

Monologues are a b****. They are no fun to do. No questionable “fun” to coach – – simply no fun. They are, however, a necessary evil of this business. How in the world would you be able to get through hundreds of auditionees in anything less then a week if you didn’t cut down the actor’s presentation to just a moment or two. I have been coaching many, many of these monologues and find myself always questioning my skills after a coaching session. I worry that I have become so lecture-like that I have taught a good lesson, but done nothing to help the student tangibly improve the monologue. On the opposite hand, worry that I have done so much game playing that the actor had “fun” with the coaching section, but gained little to make the monologue improve trhe next time.
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